12:46am January 31, 2014

Attn: Folks with disabilities!

bunnythroughthetrees:

I’m working on applying for an industrial design program at a college. My focus is on creating tools that can help assist disabled folks by increasing ease of access to…life. So what I’m looking to find out is whether folks have thought “If only ____ existed…” and what that ____ was, or what you were trying to do when you thought that. OR the things you consistently have trouble doing in the world, where some kind of object could assist in the process.

Also! Please boost if you can?

boosting myself because i think i posted it at an awkward time

Hospital bed (also regular bed, for people who don’t need hospital beds?) that doubles as a commode/toilet, but is still comfortable to sleep on.

I know it’s probably impossible but I’ve been wanting it for years.

Oh also an actual toilet that can be used lying down. I had a dream once (like an actual dream while I was asleep) that all public restrooms had them. (That was when I could not sit up for long periods and could not let my feet dangle for long periods and etc.)

It was made of some kind of smooth stone-like thing. You’d lie flat on it. Once you were lying on it, a place would open up for bowel movements, and a dome-shaped thing, like a dome on its side, would come up in front of your crotch to prevent spray issues, I think there was a drain under that part too. (Yes, I dream in that level of detail sometimes, it’s weird.)

I think it had a bidet in it too, which sprayed your butt and your front and dried them off, like any decent-functioning bidet does these days. Maybe a way to attach a Hoyer-type lift for people who need it, would be useful?

Not sure how it would work for penises though. I don’t have one, I don’t really know whether they’d be pointed in some weird direction. But at any rate such a thing would have been amazing for me at one point, because I had to be lying down almost all the time, spent a lot of time on the toilet, and didn’t have the resources to use a bedpan every time I needed to use the bathroom. I was really disappointed when I woke up.

And I know lots of people who could use something like this, especially since bedpans aren’t feasible for everyone. I know from research there’s beds that have a hole in them for use as a toilet (generally used for people with cholera?), but they are just hard wooden beds with a hole, there’s no mattress or comfort, and it’d be good to have a way to close the hole when you’re not using it.

So two different toilet things – one is a laying-down toilet, the other is a bed with a toilet installed – comfortably. Including a hospital bed variant.

I’m not sure either one is possible but they’d make a world of difference for a lot of people. Pissing and crapping yourself because you can’t get to the bathroom isn’t cool. And neither is getting UTIs from holding it in.

Also, eye gaze technology that was cheap enough to be incorporated on communication devices (and possibly things like iPads too) as a matter of course, rather than a super-expensive add-on for people who have a very narrow range of disabilities. There’s lots of us who freeze up or become super-weak some of the time and need to communicate at those times, but who don’t have a severe enough disability to qualify for eye-gaze technology for insurance purposes, who could use that. Also other technologies that don’t require much, if any, movement. (I have a thing called a Brainfinger, but it gives me a headache every time I try to use it, and I certainly wouldn’t have the mental energy to use it in the kind of situations I’m describing. Sustaining beta activity is exhausting. Plus it doesn’t even work with any of my current computers and, etc.)